3. "Getai." Www.roots.sg. https://www.roots.sg/learn/resources/ich/getai.
7. Khiun, Liew Kai, and Brenda Chan. "Vestigial Pop: Hokkien Popular Music and the Cultural Fossilization of Subalternity in Singapore." Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28, no. 2 (2013): 272.
9. Chong, Terence. "Chinese Opera in Singapore: Negotiating Globalisation, Consumerism and National Culture." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 03 (2003).
A crooning voice echoes through the speakers positioned around the temporary tent. The song warps around the red plastic chairs lined up neatly in front of the stage. The front row of seats are conspicuously left empty, a plate of offerings (an orange, paper money or kimzua, a ceremonial bun) placed at each seat.1 The stage, usually empty, a makeshift structure with a red wrap-around cloth has been converted into a multi-sensory experience. LED lights line the front of the stage, a live band plays against an ever changing projected screen of neon colours, floral motifs. Unabashedly dressed in sparkly, sequined, glitter outfits, the getai singers perform vernacular songs, the dialect stretched across the mix of synthesizer keyboard, chattering in the audience and the sound of Singapore’s urban-equivalent of the hinterland (heartland).2
Getai 歌台 or “song stage” in Mandarin, is a form of vernacular entertainment, consisting of live music, song and dance.3 Originating from the age of amusement parks in pre-war Singapore, getai began as a form of escapist entertainment, during which performers would sing traditional Chinese folk songs to entertain audiences. This practice continued through the period of Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945.
Thereafter, getai became part of the temple’s religious practice in response to the amalgamation of Taoist/Buddhist/Confucian practices of ancestor worship. Contemporarily, getai performances are often held during the 7th month of the Chinese Lunar Calendar, otherwise known as the Hungry Ghost Month, where it is believed that the gates to hell are open and spirits are free to wander in the mortal plane.4 These stages are commonly thought to be a form of entertainment for the spirits and the front row of seats at each performance is left empty in order for these spirits to come and enjoy the show.
A getai event held by Singapore’s National Heritage Board. The event banner features the definitive row of empty plastic seats and advertises the event as being “Fun for the whole family, including your ancestors”.
Getai is intended for both the living and the dead. The performances are often held in an amalgamation of dialects and languages, most prominently with songs sung in the Chinese dialect Hokkien (fujianhua) or Cantonese.5 Singing melancholic folk songs set to upbeat soundtracks played by a live band, getai performers are not only skilled singers, but also charismatic personalities, commanding the space in between songs to engage in multilingual banter. Getai is undeniably characterised by its overwhelming kitschiness - from the humorous role-playing skits to the over-the-top costumes worn by the performers. There is no such thing as too many feathers, bejewelled headpieces or sequined suits in the world of getai. Getai survives on the audaciously garish aesthetic that its performers embody and the easy, colloquial humour and novelty that they present.
In 2019, Channel News Asia released a documentary series ominously entitled “What’s Next for Singapore’s Dying Getai Trade?”. In the film, the bespectacled correspondent skims over various reasons behind the perception of getai’s impending death. There are practical reasons, he explains: aging practitioners, the demanding skill-level required from the live bands, a lack of interest amongst the younger generation to pick up the trade. It is not hard to believe from a purely numerical standpoint. Getai went from 40 acts a night, with 1000-5000 strong audiences in 2007 to getting culled from Hungry Ghost programmes because of their unpopularity and unprofitability.6
As Brenda Chan and Liew Kai Khun lament in their work on Hokkien popular music, they fear that getai has become a vestigial artifact of a culture that has long lost its relevance.7 It is easy to see why this might be so, and similarly easy to point fingers as to who is responsible. Perhaps it is the fault of the Singaporean government, in attempting to standardise Mandarin as the formal language of ethnic Chinese in Singapore, leading to the demise of dialect speaking in younger generations.8 The dialect heavy songs and banter sound like static to our untrained ears. Or maybe it is the fault of the hyper-capitalist and anglophonic trajectory of Singaporean development - the crude humour and unrefined performances are seen as lower class, marginalised by virtue of social posturing. We can blame the governmental regulation of public space (no performances after 10.30 p.m.), the lack of appeal towards the younger generation (the disconnect between folk songs and urban youth), the declining lucrativeness of getai stages (high operational costs, lack of sponsors). Chan and Liew liken the vestigiality of these performances to the ineffectuality of the flightless penguins’ wings, an evolutionary relic that has lost its importance.
However, “scholars write about the “impending death of local cultures as though they were fragile entities ready to wilt at the first sign of pressure” ignoring the strategies employed by local cultures for self-renewal”.9 If we see cultural practices as having to be preserved, we fossilise the practice and neglect to see how the practice continues to evolve. Getai is the product of continual adaptation, from its beginnings as amusement park entertainment to its co-option by the temple for religious practice, and the persistence of getai reveals its resilience, which is only possible through its reinvention to fit the times.
In this clip pedantically entitled, “Getai Show Celebration CNY Eve 2019 @Chinatown 040219”, the tune that the two young singers perform sounds familiar, even if the Mandarin lyrics prevent us from fully recognising it. Upon repeated listens, I finally realised that they were singing a Mando-pop version of Swedish supergroup ABBA’s Gimme Gimme Gimme. From the remix of a popular 1980s English disco track into a Mandarin techno-pop soundtrack, to the Mambo Jambo-esque dance moves from the young getai singers, this getai act is an amusing novelty, a cute gimmick.10
The word gimmick is often seen as something cheap, a novelty, a “wonder and a trick”.11 As Sianne Ngai explains, “Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply in part because they are job related: bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right”.12 Do the flashy costumes and bright lights distract from the rotating Powerpoint backdrop of corporate sponsors at each getai event? It is hard not to regard getai gimmicks with suspicion - are they merely an aesthetic function of the fundamental laws of capitalism?
Lee Peifeng, a veteran getai star, speaks of the constant need for visual gimmicks in getai. She focuses on the function of costumes as an audience-grabbing tactic, as she explains, “This year I may be dressed up as a princess from the ancient times. Next year, maybe I dress up as a baby (…) that’s how we constantly surprise our audience.”13
The movie 881 (dir. Royston Tan) is often credited as catalysing a renewal in the Singaporean getai scene, following its release in 2007.14 881 follows two getai singers, the Papaya Sisters, as they weather the ups-and-downs of the cutthroat getai scene and the challenges of life itself. This particular scene from the Papaya Sisters’ final performance perhaps most appropriately encapsulates what Lee Peifeng speaks of. The Papaya Sisters change instantaneously from rainbow-striped tutus and feathers to kimono-donning geishas and finally a frilled-neck lizard-esque translucent moving costume piece as they conclude their song, Yeh Hua (野花).15 The costumes are entirely asynchronous with the melancholic meaning of the Hokkien folk song (Are we fated to be together?/Just let heaven decide and accept the outcome). In a capitalist field adorned with many bells and whistles, the need to go bigger, shinier, more bedazzled, more glittery becomes imperative in order to maintain the audience’s interest. Getai seems to move further away from its “traditional” roots and becomes co-opted into the capitalist practice of gimmick and novelty.
One of the main companies that organises getai events across the island is LEX-S Entertainment. LEX-S prides itself on being ahead of the curve, using Facebook Live to broadcast getai performances, as organiser Aaron Tan proudly shows off the 12,000 views racked up during a getai performance at one of their heartland locations. In a time of COVID-19, the concept of live-stream performances might not seem so unfamiliar. However, LEX-S has been implementing these live-stream methods since August 2017, demonstrating their commitment to utilising technology as a means to expand their consumer base. The idea of live-streamed performances is undeniably a novelty of the 21st century. To be able to watch a performance that you would normally have to brave the heat and discomfort of a humid evening in the comfort of your own home is a clever trick to supplement the declining live audience with a virtual viewership. The gimmick is self-evident; are virtual re-creations sufficient replacements for the physical getai experience? Or do they compress the expansive space of getai into pixels?
Ngai expresses her concern that “the gimmick’s status as a device for producing a quick but immediately vanishing aesthetic payoff, one that cannot begin a project or sustain a tradition”.16 But watching the ABBA mando-pop remix getai stage and seeing the gleeful faces of the elderly audience members as they cha-cha at the front of the stage (one of the sister’s shouts jokingly, “Wah, Michael Jackson!”), it feels cynical to reduce getai to a gimmick, to reduce the enjoyment (whether brief or not) of the audience to their unwitting buying into a cheap ploy. Are the modern reinventions of getai merely gimmicks with a short-term effect—a shiny new costume, 10,000 viewers on Facebook Live — and no real impact on the perpetuation of getai culture?
1. Kimzua refers to the joss paper that is often burnt as offerings to ancestors.
2. Sa̓at, Alfian Bin. "Hinterland, Heartland, Home." Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 2012, 33-50. In 1999, then Prime Minister coined the term “heartland” to describe the “mostly-residential spaces occupied by HDB public housing”. In Alfian Sa̓at’s piece on affective topography in Singapore films, he discusses the hinterland as a representation of a site where “traditions could be preserved and maintained” due to its geographic distance from the urban city. Sa̓at argues that “independent Singapore, devoid of a national hinterland, constructed a surrogate in the form of the heartland”.
4. Sim, and Cheryl. "Zhong Yuan Jie (Hungry Ghost Festival)." Infopedia. July 28, 2014. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_758_2004-12-16.html. The Hungry Ghost Festival traditionally falls on the 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar. It is celebrated for the entire 7th month of the lunar calendar in Singapore. During this period, many Chinese worship their ancestors and make offerings to wandering souls that roam the earth.
5. "Chinese Resident Population by Age Group, Dialect Group and Sex, 2015." Data.gov.sg. https://data.gov.sg/dataset/chinese-resident-population-by-age-group-dialect-group-and-sex-2015?view_id=dd4d6a1b-77f9-4729-a871-3704d5d31570&resource_id=09223f90-ab2c-4e34-b1cb-28a2b49f5799. Within the ethnic Chinese population in Singapore, 39.7% of the population identifies as Hokkien (from the Fujian province). Although only 14.4% of the population identifies as Cantonese (from the Guangdong region), it is a popular dialect owing to the influence of Hong Kong media (movies, music) in Chinese Singaporean consciousness.
6. Koh, Jaime, and Stephanie. "Getai." Infopedia. February 24, 2015. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2015-02-25_161203.html.
8. Lim, Siew Yeen, and Jessie. "Speak Mandarin Campaign." Infopedia. July 03, 2013. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2013-07-04_122007.html. The Speak Mandarain Campaign was launched in 1979 in conjunction with Singapore’s bilingual policy. It discouraged the use of dialects and encouraged the use of standardised Mandarin in its place. As a result of this, subsequent generations would be educated in Mandarin and many would lose touch with their dialect groups.
10. Mambo Jambo night was a mid-week club event that was held every week from 1991 to 2012 at the nightclub, Zouk. It is a self proclaimed “national phenomenon”. I have been told that in my parents’ days, the club goers used to have choreographed dances to the popular tracks of that era.
11. Ngai, Sianne. "Theory of the Gimmick." Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2017): 466-505.
12. Ngai, “Gimmick”, 466.
13. Koh, Jeremy. What's next for Singapore's dying getai (歌台) trade? | Correspondents' Diary. Channel News Asia, 2019.
14. Biston, Jovanda. “Singapore Film on Music for Dead Brings Hokkien to Life.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 31 Aug. 2007, www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-getai/singapore-film-on-music-for-dead-brings-hokkien-to-life-idUSSP27516220070831 .
15. Nlb. "路边野花." NLB Music SG. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/music/music/track/1bf17417-606a-4ceb-a69f-72c0fd993e8d.
16. Ngai. “Gimmick.”, 483.
The gimmick, I argue, is not a purely aesthetic function in getai. Instead, getai has (and continues to) co-opt and transforms the capitalist aesthetic of the gimmick into a form of cultural renewal.
Historically, getai originated around the time of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore (1942-1945) and in spite of the fact that getai performers sang mostly Chinese folk and traditional songs, getai appealed to the music-loving sensibilities of the Japanese colonial officers and increased in popularity amidst a time of occupation.17 After the war, getai continued to flourish as a popular form of entertainment. In a few years, when faced with a decline in popularity in the 1960s, getai strategised. They utilised the religious concepts of ancestral worship as a means to reinforce the necessity of their practice. Getai then became integral to the rituals of the Hungry Ghost Festival, getai, as they made themselves known to be, to be important for both the living and the dead.
17. Wang, Zhenchun. Xinjiapo Ge Tai Shi Hua. Xinjiapo Qing Nian Shu Ju, 2006.
Getai exists in contradictions. Getai singers and organisers never fail to consider the economic necessities for their continual performances. Getai, after all, is a business - concerned with profit margins and economic sustainability. Yet, seemingly counterintuitively, getai events are entirely free for the general public. Getai emerged as entertainment for the masses, and and continues to be available and accessible for those who wish to participate.18 Performances are colloquial - linguistically and architecturally. Getai is performed in dialects that are familiar to their older audiences and sound like home for younger generations (my grandmother’s mother tongue, my grandfather’s lingua franca).19
The performances are held in unassuming gazebo-like make-shift tents below housing estates, which allow the audience to spill over the temporarily arranged rows of chairs, for transient spirits to wander in and out. Getai is made up of these contradictions; it is unabashedly capitalist, yet somehow socialist.
The relationship between the gimmick and capitalism is articulated as such: “The gimmick seems to make certain capitalist operations transparent, in a curiously not entirely pleasurable way. On the other hand, something about it seems to make these capitalist operations obscure.”20 Getai has co-opted the aesthetic functions of capitalism in an attempt to create a space free from the subjugations of capitalism itself. It is simultaneously unironically gimmicky and self-aware of the tactics it implements. This full embrace of the gimmick, in both transparency and obfuscation, allows for getai to constantly reinvent itself while laying transparent the capitalist machinations that lay behind the gimmicks they employ.
Getai exposes the nature of capitalist practices to us, demonstrating the crisis of continual reinvention - an endless stream of novelties, technologies, gadgets and gizmos. Yet, getai does not attempt to distance itself from the gimmick, rather gimmicks have become an intrinsic part of the getai practice. There is no shame in Lee Pei Fen’s multiple costume changes and genuine excitement in Aaron Tan’s live stream viewership statistics. While Ngai explains that “calling something a gimmick is a distancing judgment …(to) … publicly proclaim ourselves unconvinced by, or impervious to, the capitalist device’s claims and attractions”, getai flips this on its head through its transformation of the gimmick.21 Gimmicks in getai are no longer capitalist tricks we have to be apotropaically averse to. Instead through the simultaneity of getai’s illumination of and protection against capitalist machinations, we no longer feel the pressure to denounce these “cheap” attractions when getai itself contains and embraces all these contradictions, through its gaudy costumes and bright lights.
Where getai once served as an escape from the oppressiveness of occupying forces, the space that getai now carves out in the heartland of Singapore is one free from the oppressiveness of a hyper capitalist, “humourless state”.22 “The carnivalesque in getai creates “temporal windows of opportunity for freedom from political subjugation … when people enter liminal spaces where normally highly disciplined social roles are temporarily exchanged or discarded”.23 The getai stage provides a space where all - the obsolete dialect speakers, the nostalgic working and middle classes, the marginalised workers of Singapore’s silent labour force and the youths who have grown up in a state of terminal velocity - can discard their social roles at the edge of the tent and participate in the “carnival”.
18. STOMP. "Even Foreign Workers Enjoy a Good G 2010 <http://singaporeseen.stomp.com.sg “In recent years, Chinese and Indian migrant workers drawn by the prospect of free entertainment in the open have also made up part of its audience.” In spite of the apparent language barrier, it appears that getai has drawn an audience due to its geographical and financial accessibility.
19. Khiun, Chan. “Hokkien Music.”, 272. “Hokkien music resembles more of a vestigial articulation of working class tribulations and of middle class nostalgia and reaction to the vicissitudes of capitalist modernity in Singapore.”
20. Ngai. “Gimmick.”, 493.
21. Ngai. “Gimmick.”, 471.
22. Khiun, Chan. “Hokkien Music.” 283
23. Bruner, Lane. "Carnivalesque Protest and the Humourless State". Text & Performance Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): 139.
The getai stage (in relation to the Hungry Ghost Festival) creates a liminal space that exists even beyond that of the current metaphysical world. The getai stage conjures a “ghostly historical topography (that causes) a disjuncture of memory and topography that is violently, temporarily conflated within the hyper-controlled surfaces of the contemporary city”.24 Getai is not just an escape for the living, but for the spirits that traffick amongst us, the getai stage is a vestige of the past that guides the ancestral spirits to familiarity. The conflation of the spiritual world and the memory of history into a colloquial and spatial location decolonises the spaces that have been marked out in Singapore’s neocolonial nationhood. As long as getai is able to embody this imagined space amidst the construct of the nation-state, it will continue to have the potential for renewal.
In a time where concerns about an increasingly amnesiac relationship to history emerges, efforts are often redirected into preservation of cultural practices, in an attempt to freeze them contemporaneously, in fear that it may sink into oblivion with the passage of time.
Alvin Tan, 19, is one of Singapore’s youngest getai singers. He performs under the mentorship of veteran getai singer, Wang Lei, who mentors promising getai performers for free.25
24. Comaroff, Joseph. "Ghostly Topographies: Landscape and Biopower in modern Singapore". Cultural Geographies 14, no. 1 (2007): 63.
25. Yufeng, Kok. "Getai Performers Getting Younger - and so Are Audiences." The New Paper. November 25, 2016. https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore-news/getai-performers-getting-younger-and-so-are-audiences.
Zi Jun, 15, has helped his father redesign his mobile getai into a multicoloured, LED light adorned float that can be driven to cemeteries during the Hungry Ghost Festival.
In a time of “circuit breaker” measures where staying at home is the new norm, LEX-S Entertainment has uploaded an “E-Getai” series to entertain their regular getai audiences.26 With an average of 70K views on each uploaded performance, it would seem that the outreach of these technological platforms have now created a virtual space that getai can now occupy as well.
26. Sun, David. "E-getai Entertains the Elderly at Home." The New Paper. April 20, 2020. https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore/e-getai-entertains-elderly-home.
When we perceive a cultural practice as having to be fossilised, we preemptively remove its agency in promoting its own renewal and sustenance. Getai cannot be perceived purely as a traditional practice, when its roots have origins that span across early Chinese opera, an era of amusement parks in Singapore, ties to the spiritual world and good old-fashioned entertainment. In itself, getai’s roots are in the flux of modernity and tradition. Getai has not survived because of top-down approaches in “preserving traditional cultures” but rather through the way its practitioners, organisers and audiences have continually strategised and adapted to the changing world around it. The getai community has learnt to grow around the restrictions of governmental regulation, of changing linguistic landscapes, of increasingly capitalist processes. In fact, getai has taken the aesthetics of capitalism and utilised it to its advantage. In getai, gimmick is no longer a ‘dirty’ word; in it contains the transformative potential for cultural renewal.
Returning to the metaphor of the vestigial penguin wings, the assumption made in likening getai to the evolutionary relic of these flightless birds is that biological evolution has a definitive endpoint. However, evolution is continuous and indefinite; as environments continue to change, the power of being human is our ability to adapt. If we are able to see cultural practices in terms of constant evolution rather than focus on its continual preservation, we allow it the malleability to be reinterpreted and reconfigured by the generations to come. As Singapore grapples with the side effects of its intensive industrialisation and globalisation, the nation-state’s hyperfixation on preserving tradition intensifies in response to the modern nation’s dislocated relationship with the past. In dichotomising history and the present, a wedge is driven in between tradition and modernity, as though the past and present exist in silo. Recognising the malleability of cultural practices is to breakaway from the idea of cultural renewal as simply being the repackaging of nostalgia for modern consumption, but instead to see their evolution as a negotiation of our ever-present relationship with the past. The cultural resilience of getai cannot be overlooked; its persistence extends beyond the totalising binaries of past/present, tradition/modernity, and it is this resilience that allows cultural practices to evolve and persist in a world that hopes to render it obsolete.
Credits:
Credits to Sylvester Tan's amazing Reinterpretation of Getai's Aesthetics as A Visual Language for Contemporary Culture which extracts the graphic elements of getai's "aesthetic" in relation to an in depth investigation of elements of getai culture in order to reformulate it contemporarily. The font used for the header is "Getai Grotesk", which is available for free download at www.getaikitsch.com.
Link to footnotes and works cited
Many many thanks to Kristi, Elk and my Visual and Critical Studies class at SAIC.